Grateful

There is a chill in the air on this late summer morning despite the bright sunshine. I am sitting alone at an outdoor table at a busy café enjoying a breakfast sandwich, a simple fare of eggs, cheese, and bacon with a cup of coffee. Life is good and I am overwhelmed with gratitude. I am grateful for waking up this morning in good enough health at the age of 77 and for the company of my wife of 53 years.

We talk about how we plan to spend the day, she with her painting and I with a meeting with an older friend followed by some time working in the library. My friend, a writer and poet, just turned 88 and lives at a nearby retirement home.

The short drive to his place brings me along roads flanked by tall oaks, pines, and maples. In stretches, the trees are set close together and driveways afford only passing glimpses of elegant houses. A college campus adds variety to the landscape on the left, and a little farther on, a farm spreads out on the right. A left turn at the traffic light brings me onto a busier road that was a major thoroughfare in colonial times.

Soon I turn off onto a side road that passes a cemetery and connects to the home stretch. Here the road rises through more trees to the top of a hill crowned by a large building where my friend lives.

I sign in, take a visitor’s pass and make my way up to the poet’s room on the fourth floor. “Come,” he answers my knock, and we greet each other like the good friends we have become in the two years since we met. He has been listening to some light jazz playing on YouTube with a picture of a Parisian street on his TV screen.

“What is it,” my friend asks, “that makes us love music so much?”

Now we are off and running on a conversation that flags Oliver Sacks’ book “Musicophilia” as something we both might enjoy reading and moves on to the bigger issue of the human attraction to beauty in all of its forms. He tells me about his habit of watching the sunrise from the window of the last place he lived and how the turkeys roosting in the trees behind and above the house would fly down as if responding to an alarm clock.

Do they appreciate the beauty of the rising sun the way we humans do or are they just jumping to a wakeup call? There is a difference, we agree, a spiritual quality in humans that my friend sees as a response to the beauty of God shining forth in all of creation. I am inclined to agree.

We spend some time catching up on our lives. It has only been two weeks but he tells me that he celebrated his birthday last week with a party thrown for him by his large family of brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, and grand nieces and nephews. It was a wonderful celebration, but it was exhausting. At 88, my friend is feeling his age, but he still makes the rounds doing his poetry readings, most often these days in retirement homes but also with some appearances at universities.

Our conversation turns to the sorry state of our country and the world. Wars continue in Ukraine, Russia, Israel and Gaza, international institutions have lost much of their authority, and, at home, hateful rhetoric and political violence have largely replaced civil discourse.

The problem of evil is always with us. As in every generation, it falls to the old to take stock of how we got here and what we might still be able to do, at least in our own circles of influence, to make things even a little better. There are more questions than answers, but I am grateful for the chance to discuss these things with my friend.

Our visit is almost over and my friend hasn’t had a chance to read his latest poem that lies on the small table by his side. We agree to save it for next time and part, already looking forward to where our conversation will take us when we meet again.

And so, on my way to the library, I sit here at a table outside this busy café celebrating the day with a breakfast sandwich and feeling grateful. Grateful for the beauty of nature that surrounds me, for my wife and family and the friends, old and new, who sustain me with their love and support. It will not always be so. Loss comes around. I can only hope that when the chill in the air on this sunny day turns into the cold of winter, I will find a way to remain grateful.

If not for the snow, then surely for the shelter that love can provide.